Bye-Bye Software Patents

The nonsensical software-patent that USA has tried to foist on the world, destroying motivation to innovate and taxing true innovation,“back in January, art units at the USPTO rejected applications based on Section 101 of US Patent law only about 24% of the time. Section 101 covers what is patent eligible, and was the key part in the decision in the Alice case. Effectively, in the Alice ruling, the Supreme Court said that just doing something on a generic computer wasn’t patent eligible under Section 101. Following that ruling, in July, the rejection rate jumped to 78%. Yes, from 24% in January to 78% in June.” is going down the drain. USPTO is rejecting most such applications and invalidating many already issued. In a few years we will wake up an all the trouble M$ and others have caused the world will just be a fading memory.

About Robert Pogson

I am a retired teacher in Canada. I taught in the subject areas where I have worked for almost forty years: maths, physics, chemistry and computers. I love hunting, fishing, picking berries and mushrooms, too.

9 Responses to Bye-Bye Software Patents

Joe.M wrote, “Maybe one day we’ll find a vaccine for the tech sector’s horrible disease.”

FLOSS and GNU/Linux work for me and many others. Once you connect with a distro like Debian and become familiar with a sufficient set of apps the “need” for that other OS disappears. That need is just more of M$’s vapourware.

Jim Allchin wrote, in 1997, “The entire PC model is being attacked. It is being attacked because we have real sins (complexity and cost)”

He was writing about “the PC model” being Wintel and Java and thin clients challenging that but the same is applicable today. Staying on the Wintel treadmill is just a route to waste. Folks who use Wintel get ever-increasing complexity and pay ever more money on the promise of reducing complexity. It’s just silly in the case of the desktop. The cost should be ~$0 or a bit more but M$ has charged consumers ~$100 for two decades. The complexity is so bad that consumers have to decide how much money to waste because various versions of that other OS have various crippling damage and folks with a bunch of PCs need a server OS and more licences just to “manage” them. There are folks who think it’s perfectly OK to spend ~$1K per PC per annum just for software and “managing” it. It’s all a scam. When I switched to GNU/Linux my life became much easier as far as IT went and most of my employers enjoyed the freedom to use hardware that had been put in storage because it would no longer work with that other OS.

Microsoft is the technology industry parasite. They can’t exist without mooching off of someone else’s success. They started off as a hanger-on to IBM and Apple’s business, not suprising they are moving on to suck the life out of Google. Maybe one day we’ll find a vaccine for the tech sector’s horrible disease.

For example, imagine if a patent reform allowed Android to use FAT32 and Exchange to interface with Windows without having to pay an “interoperability tax”. All that mooching MS does on someone else’s work will be gone!

Hey! The Supremes have stated that it is the moochers and freeloaders reinventing the wheel on computers and applying for patents who have to be put in their place, not the rest of us. The whole purpose of patents is to spur innovation by giving garage-workshop tinkerers some leverage in the market. It was never intended that someone moving a task onto a computer should be able to hold the world for ransome or to prevent innovation. Software is particularly evil because many systems these days have millions of lines of code and there could be software patents on tens of thousands of features in any system making the system uneconomic because of the parasites demanding royalties. Consider Android/Linux for instance. Do you really believe the world is better off because someone buying a smartphone with Android/Linux is paying a few dollars that goes to M$ for doing nothing at all? How does that make any sense? How is M$ not being a freeloader when they can’t make a smartphone that sells more than a few percent using the same wonderful invention? Innovation is someone developing something new not someone developing a new way to tax the innovation of someone else.

“In the Supreme Court case, known as CLS Bank International v. Alice Corp., the court was asked to consider whether software could be patented at all—a question courts have largely left unanswered for years.”

Freeloader, someone that uses unencumbered software to their advantages.

Example: Google (Chromebook) and Amazon (Kindle), took Linux, an unencumbered OS and built it into something that sells extremely well.

Thank you freeloaders for your innovations.

“Many of these patents are just taxes and impediments to those companies that are doing the hard work of building products and putting them in the hands of customers”

My Mission

My observations and opinions about IT are based on 40 years of use in science and technology and lately, in education. I like IT that is fast, cost-effective and reliable. I do not care whether my solution is the same as yours. I like to think for myself.

My first use of GNU/Linux in 2001 was so remarkably better than what I had been using, I feel it is important work to share GNU/Linux with the world. I have been blessed by working in schools where students and school systems have benefited by good, modular software easily installed in most systems.

I have shown GNU/Linux to thousands of students and hundreds of teachers over the years and will continue in some way doing that until I die in spite of the opposition.